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JUN 72 T'l? 

[Reprinted from Journal of American Irish Historical Society, Vol. IX, 1910.] 



\ 
THE IRISH SETTLERS OF SOUTHERN NEW HAMP- 
SHIRE. 



BY HON. JAMES F. BRENNAN, HISTORIOGRAPHER AND MEMBER OF THE 
EXECUTIVE COUNCIL OF THE AMERICAN IRISH HISTORICAL SOCI- 
ETY^ A MEMBER OF THE NEW HAMPSHIRE HISTORICAL SOCIETY^ 
AND HISTORIOGRAPHER OF THE PETERBOROUGH HISTORICAL SOCI- 
ETY^ PETERBOROUGH, N. H. 



The men who endured the hardships of this rough climate and 
encountered the dangers incident to the opening up of this wild 
country, had to be a class of men with strong hearts and resolute 
purposes. It was no place for the weak ; each had to be a soldier in 
the battle for existence; each had to do his share in conquering the 
hardy soil and defending himself and his family against the ever 
present dangers of Indians and the wild beasts which then infested 
the territory. 

The Plymouth Colony, composed largely of Englishmen, had for 
over a century established itself in Eastern Massachusetts, provided 
itself with comfortable settlements and enacted laws as intolerant as 
this country has ever known, but had not penetrated into New Hamp- 
shire. These Puritans, who, it is said, "first fell on the knees and 
then on the aborigines," had roasted witches, driven Quakers, Bap- 
tists and all others, who were outside the pale of the Church of 
England, with buck shot into the tender mercies of the savage inte- 
rior; fleeing from the intolerance of their own church in their quest 
of religious liberty, they inaugurated a system of unparalleled reli- 
gious slavery here.^ 

These Puritans were not the kind of men, with their selfish views, 

^ Prof. E. D. Sanborn writing of these Puritans (1 Granite Monthly, 34), 
said : "Some portion of the bigotry, intolerance and persecution of Massachu- 
setts Puritans migrated to New Hampshire with their laws. The result was a 
few prosecutions of witches and Quakers, but no capital convictions. After the 
lapse of a century some disabilities and distraint of goods for the support of 
'the* standing order' or clergy were inflicted on dissenters from the established 
creed. This petty intolerance continued until about 1819, when the Toleration 
Act became a law of New Hampshire." 



r ^si 



best calculated to extend civilization; their received with disfavor 
and imprecations the hardy Irish Presbyterians who arrived in Boston 
in 1736. These Englishmen always treated the emigrants from Ire- 
land in a way calculated to discourage further Irish emigration, but 
this did not deter these hardy men, who, however, found the inhos- 
pitable and cold interior preferable to the section where the influ- 
ence of Puritanism had established itself and left the darkest record 
of intolerance to be found in the history of this country. 

Irish in considerable numbers had landed eighteen years before, 
but the continuing antipathy, which had ever existed in the English 
Puritans against the "Wild Irishmen," as they termed them, were 
renewed on the arrival of the men in 1736 who were destined to 
bring civilization into New Hampshire. 

In the siumner of 1718 five ships, with a hundred or more emi- 
grant families, came over from Ireland to Boston; some of them 
found their way to Worcester and thence to Palmer, Pelham, Cole- 
raine and other towns in Massachusetts; a large nmnber, under the 
lead of the Rev. John Morehead, founded the Federal Street Church 
in Boston, and one ship with some twenty families, sailing for the 
Merrimac late in the autumn, was driven into Casco Bay, and was 
frozen in for the winter at the place, which soon afterwards became 
the town of Portland ; their provisions giving out, they suffered some 
hardships, but found relief among the inhabitants there. 

A few families settled in that vicinity; the rest, in the spring of 
1719, sailed up the Merrimac to Haverhill, and thence proceeded to 
that high and beautiful region of country that was called Nutfield, 
because it abounded in nuts; and there they determined to locate 
their grant of twelve miles square of land. 

This grant had been made by Gov. Samuel Shute, then governor 
of both provinces, upon a petition signed in Ireland, March 26, 1718, 
by 217 persons, all but seven signing "in a fair, legible hand," before 
they set out on their voyage. These sixteen first settlers and their 
families that had thus arrived, on the 22d day of April, 1719, had 
come over in company with their pastor, the Rev. James McGregor, 
most of them from his parish of Aghadowey, six miles south of 
Coleraine in the County of Londonderry, Ireland. Among them 
were Samuel Allison, James Gregg, James McKean, John Mitchell, 
John Morrison, Thomas Steele and John Stuart. They were soon 
joined by a large number of their compatriots, the lands were divided 



3 out to a long list of grantees, and in 1722 the town was incorporated 
^ by New Hampshire authority by the name of Londonderry. 
^ In 1736, seventeen years later, another ship, with emigrants from 
Ireland, landed at Boston. These families passed the winter at 
Lexington, and in the next summer settled at Lunenburg, Massachu- 
setts, and other towns in that vicinity. Among them were the names 
Cunningham, Ferguson, McNee, Little, Robbe, Scott, Smith, Stuart, 
Swan, White and Wilson. 

From these two colonies southern New Hampshire was first settled. 
At the time when Londonderry, New Hampshire, was founded, 
descendants of the English Puritans from Massachusetts had settled 
along the Merrimac River as far north as the old town of Dunstable. 
Bitter jealousies existed between the two sorts of people. At first it 
was said the Puritans hardly knew what to make of the newcomers; 
they called them the "Wild Irish." When they started up the Merri- 
mac in boats, and one boat was upset in the rapids, a Puritan poet 
wrote : 

"They soon began to scream and bawl, 
As out they tumbled one and all. 
And, if the devil had spread his net. 
He could have made a glorious haul." 

The Puritans, in ridicule, said of these Irishmen that "they held 
as fast to their pint of doctrine as to their pint of rum." 

Thus was shown the relations existing between these Englishmen 
and Irishmen at that early period. Will this feeling of unfriend- 
liness ever change? When the English people release Ireland from 
bondage and permit her to take such a position among the nations 
of the earth that Emmet's epitaph can be written, then and not till 
then will the Irish people look with favor upon England and her 
government. 

These Irish settlers were intensely anti-English long before that 
sentiment found violent expression in the War of the Revolution, 
in which they participated with such zeal and self-sacrifice. As 
recorded in the Peterborough town history, it was the attempts to 
establish the Church of England and to destroy the prevailing reli- 
gious systems, so dear to the people, together with the oppressive land 
laws, that created in these Irish Presbyterians a hatred for the form 
of government under which they lived. In Ireland they were made 



by that church the objects of persecutions as mean, cruel and savage 
as any which have disgraced the annals of religious bigotry and 
crime. "Many were treacherously and ruthlessly butchered, and the 
ministers were prohibited, under severe penalties, from preaching, 
baptizing or ministering in any way to their flocks." 

And it is further stated that the "Government of that day, never 
wise in their commercial relations or their governmental affairs, 
began to recognize them only in the shape of taxes and embarrassing 
regulations upon their industry and trade. In addition to these 
restrictions, the landlords — for the people then as now did not own 
land, they only rented it — whose long leases had now expired, occa- 
sioned much distress by an extravagant advance of the rents, which 
brought the people to a degrading subjection to England; and 
many of them were reduced to comparative poverty." 

They would no longer submit to these wrongs, and "animated by 
the same spirit that moved the American mind in the days of the 
Revolution, resolved to submit to these oppressive measures no 
longer, and sought a freer field for the exercise of their industry and 
the enjoyment of their religion." How like the present condition ! 

The sentiments of these people were the same as of the present 
emigrants from Ireland. They were composed in a very small part 
of Scotchmen, Englishmen and other nationalities, but the essential 
part of the pioneers of this section, in fact, nearly all of them, were 
Irishmen, for I assiune that where men were born in Ireland, as they 
were, where many of their fathers, some of their grandfathers and 
great grandfathers were born, they were men who can unqualifiedly 
be called Irishmen. 

Adopt any other standard and a large part of the inhabitants of 
Ireland at the time they emigrated would not be considered Irish- 
men, and probably few persons in this town today would be consid- 
ered Americans. 

These Scots (who, it must always be remembered, were of ancient 
Celtic origin) from whom the pioneers of this section trace their 
ancestry landed in Ireland, as the Londonderry, New Hampshire, 
history records it, in 1610, more than a century and a quarter before 
their descendants came to this country in 1736. 

The early settlers of this vicinity may be taken as typical of the 
men who settled other towns in southern New Hampshire. They 



were practically all Irish, many from the northern counties, with 
some from the middle and southern counties of Ireland. 

The towns settled by these Irishmen were, in most instances, named 
in honor of one of the settlers, or from towns in Ireland; some, 
however, submitted to a change from the names first adopted by 
them, in order to insure the obtaining of their charters; thus, when 
John Taggart and others from Peterborough in 1769 settled in what 
is now Stoddard, they named it Limerick and it was thus known up 
to the time of incorporation in 1774, when its present name was 
adopted; the name of the township of Boyle was changed to Gilsum 
when incorporated in 1763; other similar changes were made under 
English regime and through English influences. When, however, 
these Irish settlers themselves selected names for their towns, no 
English influence obtained, for it must be remembered that the pres- 
ent English and Scotch sentiments, we now hear so much about, did 
not possess that sturdy, loyal Irish people; the modernly invented 
name of "Scotch-Irish," for instance — so far as we have any his- 
tory, tradition or information — was unknown, unmentioned and 
unrecorded by any of them at any time, the originators and promoters 
of this strange and peculiar "Scotch-Irish" theory being strictly prod- 
ucts of our own time and of our own country; there were, for exam- 
ple, no such names as London, Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield, Edin- 
burgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, given to towns where these settlers 
located, but the selection of names was from their own people, or 
from their own Ireland, which they loved so well, where they and 
their ancestors for many generations were born, where their kinsmen 
and their descendants remaining are found today resenting this 
modern "Scotch Irish" appellation, as these settlers would un- 
doubtedly do themselves if living ; it was in Ireland their sympathies 
centered and found expression in their selection of distinctly Irish 
names of the towns they settled, such as Dublin, Belfast, Coleraine, 
Boyle, Limerick, Derry, Kilkenny, Antrim and many other purely 
Irish names. 

These Irish, who settled southern New Hampshire — the pioneers 
in the march of civilization — became the establishers and defenders 
of popular government here; their blood, transmitted to the genera- 
tion following them, produced patriots who stood as a secure bulwark 
in defense of the political structure their forefathers had reared; 
thus. Irishmen have been identified with every movement in our state 



history from the time when the Irishman Darby Field discovered the 
White Mountains (naming them after Slieve Bawn or White Hills, 
in the barony of South Ballintubber, County Roscommon, Ireland) 
down to the present day. I cannot in this brief sketch refer to the 
part played by men of Irish descent such as Gen. John Stark, Gen. 
John Sullivan, Gen. James Miller, Col. Hercules Mooney and hun- 
dreds of others, who have left their impress upon the annals of our 
commonwealth. In the history of our state and nation one thing is 
satisfactorily settled and entirely clear, namely, that where Irish 
blood is found, there you will find true, unflinching, uncompromising 
defenders of the honor and integrity of our government and laws. 
The late Judge Jeremiah S. Black once said: "I have seen black 
swans, and have heard of white crows, but an Irish traitor to Amer- 
ican liberty I never saw nor even heard of." 

These early Irish settlers were, in their religious belief, uncompro- 
misingly rigid Presbyterians of the strictest stamp.^ Their progeny, 
however, have almost entirely abandoned that severe old doctrine for 
the, so called, liberal modem modes of worship. However well 
anchored these old timers may have been in their religious belief, it 
seemingly was not such as commended itself to their posterity,^ and 

^ The late L. A. Morrison of Derry, N. H., said of them (lo Granite 
Monthly, page 249), that "They were hard-hearted, long-headed, level-headed, 
uncompromising, unconquered and unconquerable Presbyterians. They were of 
a stern and rugged type. They clung to the tenets of the Presbyterian faith 
with a devotion, constancy and obstinacy little short of bigotry and in it was 
mingled little of that charity for others of a different faith, 'which suffereth 
long,' and it was said of them in 1790: 'They have a great deal of substantial 
civility, without much courtesy to relieve it, and set it off to the best ad- 
vantage.' The bold idea of rights and privileges, which seem inseparable from 
their Presbyterian church, renders them apt to be ungracious and litigious in 
their dealings. On the whole the middle and lower ranks of people, in this 
quarter of the kingdom, are a valuable part of the community ; but one must 
estimate their worth as a miner often does his ore, rather by its weight than 
its splendor." — Letters concerning the Northern Coast of the County Antrim 
Island, by William Hamilton, Dublin, 1790, page 117. 

* "From the notices given and extracts taken from records, it will be seen 
that Presbyterianism in New England had passed its noonday, and that its 
tide had begun to ebb." History of Presbyterianism in New England, by Alex- 
ander Blaikie, 1882, page 197. With reference to the condition in Peterborough, 
it was stated: "The number of members of the church in 1850 was 175, in 
1856 their roll was reduced to 67 members and in 1859 Presbyterianism became 
extinct in Peterborough." lb., page 367. 



today we find no church of their denomination in this section, and 
indeed comparatively few in the state. 

In 1799 the disaffection in Peterborough with the old mode of 
Presbyterian worship took tangible form ; it was too strict ; personal 
controversies at first broke out which led to dissensions and the some- 
what easier ritual of Congregationalism attracted a considerable num- 
ber, and, having at that time only one church edifice, in the interest 
of peace and convenience, communion was served at stated times in 
the Presbyterian form and at other times in the Congregational form ; 
but liberalism was not then satisfied and Unitarianism appeared to 
claim its share; with these dissensions came the Baptists and Meth- 
odists, then other religions of modern invention and atheism with no 
religion at all, finally shared in the general mix-up ; a sort of go-as- 
you-please condition, embodying the so-called up-to-date ideas, where 
each strikes out a new religion to suit himself, or takes a hand in 
reforming old notions, until the original anchorage was abandoned 
and entirely new dogmas were substituted for the old.^ 

None of these old Irish settlers were Catholics, far from it; but 
the Catholic Church, which they abhorred, was destined to flourish 
and grow in the town they established, and today that church has 

As an instance of this evolution may be mentioned the efforts of a very 
estimable lady of our town in 1896 at a church meeting, called for the pur- 
pose, who proposed the substitution of water for wine in the church service ; 
the question was solemnly and prayerfully discussed, was not voted down, 
but the motion was laid on the table, where it still remains for future de- 
termination ; the matter was not decided then ; possibly their progressiveness 
had not sufficiently advanced. But less important questions have been the 
foundation of some modern church doctrines. Who will say that this theory, 
advanced, as then alleged, in the interest of temperance, may not find favor 
in some new church of, so called, advanced ideas, which will profoundly 
urge — as is already urged by individuals — that the wine mentioned in the 
Bible was not in fact wine at all, nothing more or less than water? 

A strange spectacle indeed, ten persons of only ordinary intelligence and 
scholarship — who came together after a few hours' notice — essaying to make 
a corrected interpretation of the Bible and radically changing one of the most 
important church dogmas which has received the consideration and approval 
of the great theologians of the past ; absurd you may say, but it is in a very 
similar manner that many of the churches composing the present religious 
medley came into existence. Oh shades of old Presbyterianism, could your an- 
cient devotees but see the wanderings of their progeny in the groping for the 
true path ! 



8 

a resident priest and the largest religious congregation in Peter- 
borough. 

Bat the religion of these Irish settlers is not important in our 
present inquiry; I merely mention it in passing. We are not ask- 
ing whether they were Catholics or Presbyterians, Whigs or Tories, 
but are dealing with the more pertinent inquiry — from a cosmopol- 
itan standpoint at least, namely, the nationality of the men who 
brought civilization to this section. 

While many of us may not indeed agree with all their religious 
ideas, we cannot but admire their sterling qualities and take a racial 
pride in the fact that the land from which they and their fore- 
fathers came was the same land from which we and our forefathers 
came ; a land where the people possessed the fear of God, and clung 
to virtue, fidelity and patriotism as cardinal principles; a people 
having the courage, constancy and industry necessary for successful 
pioneers in this new country. 

They were in no sense "Irish Scots" or "Scotch-Irish," but Irish- 
men pure and simple; Irishmen to the manor born; Irishmen by 
origin, ancestry, sentiment, names, education and tradition; Irish- 
men with all the manners, traits and characteristics of the Irish. 
This name "Scotch-Irish" is of modern invention. Why did it not 
exist in writings of years ago? Simply because these Irishmen 
claimed no Scotch relationship. 

I verily believe that if a person had called one of these hardy 
Irishmen a Scotch- Irishman, he would have received the same 
treatment Rev. James McGregor dealt out, when an impertinent 
fellow replied to the parson, that "Nothing saved him but his cloth," 
he immediately threw off his coat and squared himself for action, 
saying, "It shall not protect you, sir," and gave the fellow a 
thrashing. 

In these latter days, as the late lamented Col. John C. Linehan 
well said, a new school of writers has sprung up, whose pride of 
ancestry outstrips their knowledge, and whose prejudices blind their 
love of truth. With the difference in religion between certain sec- 
tions of the Irish people as a basis, they are bent on creating a new 
race, christening it "Scotch-Irish," laboring hard to prove that it is a 
"brand" superior to either of the two old types, and while clinging 
to the Scotch root, claim that their ancestors were different from the 
Irish in blood, morals, language and religion. 



Scotch Irish in Analogy. 

Let us get ourselves right on this 
Scotch-Irish dream while we are about it. 
When we have a subject under considera- 
tion it is then the best time to settle, if 
possible, any disputed point. As previous- 
ly stated, this is not a diflBcult question — 
in so far as it relates to the early settlers 
of this town — if we pursue the inquiry 
honestly and not try to discover something 
non-existing. The position here taken is 
not dealt with or controverted by Bol- 
ton in his work. By analogy we can the 
better understand a situation, hence, I 
employ analogy. 

The present residents of Peterborough, 
who are descendants from the old Irish 
families of Smith, Morrison, Scott, Moore, 
Miller, White, V/ilson, Taggart, Wallace, 
Steele, Gregg, Robbe, and scores of other 
Irish settlers, are today considered, as 
they properly have been for several gen- 
erations, Americans. You would not call 
them Irish-Americans, would you ? They 
were and are Americans, if we have 
Americans outside the Indians, for the 
reason that they have resided here for 
generations, over a century, since their 
ancestors came here from Ireland. If 
then these present residents of our town 
are Americans, why call the early Irish 
settlers of Peterborough Scotch-Irish, 
who, in a similar way, for generations 
and for over a century lived in Ireland 
before they came to this country ? If 
these early settlers were Scotch-Irish, 
surely the present inhabitants of this 
town who trace their ancestry from these 
early Irish settlers must, by the same 
logic, be considered Irish-Americans. 

Let us call the present residents of our 
town, who are descendants from these old 
Irish settlers, Americans, not Irish-Ameri- 
cans, the race having been here long 



enough to be so considered. On precisely 
the same ground, under entirely similar 
circumstances and by exactly the same 
reasoning, we should call those early 
settlers, Irish, as they themselves did in 
their early writings, in their town records 
and on their gravestones, and not the 
modernly invented and applied name of 
Scotch-Irish, the race having been in Ire- 
land long enough, even if they were of 
Scotch ancestry (which was not the case) 
to be considered Irish. We are not now 
considering their religious but their racial 
status. 

Again: suppose these Irish settlers, who 
came to this country in 1736, happened 
to be descendants of Americans who a 
long time before had gone from America 
to Ireland; in that supposed case the 
descendants of these Irish settlers would 
not only be considered Americans by long 
residence, but of course by origin and 
ancestry as well. It is right at this point 
we should remember that the ancestors 
of these so called Scotch-Irish, who went 
from Scotland to Ireland in 1610, had, 
long before, emigrated from Northern 
Ireland across the narrow North Channel 
to Southern Scotland; thus, these Irish 
who emigrated to New England from Ire- 
land in 1736, were, in a like manner, not 
only Irish by over a centur)''s residence 
in Ireland, but they were Irish by origin 
and ancestry as well and Scotch in no 
sense or degree whatever ; they were in- 
deed Irish-Irish, if it may be so expressed, 
instead of Scotch-Irish. Let us be honest 
and not attempt to distort facts in a way 
to suit our ideas or purposes, nor try to 
change, in the interest of modern fads 
historical truth. 

James F. Brennan. 

— From Peterboro, (N. H,,) Transcript, 
Aug. 18, 1910. 



This is a question not difficult to settle for those who are disposed 
to treat it honestly, but as a rule, the writers who are the most 
prolific, as well as the speakers who are the most eloquent, appear 
to know the least about the subject, and care less, if they can only 
succeed in having their theories accepted. 

The Irish origin of the Scots^ is studiously avoided by nearly all 
the "Scotch-Irish" writers, or, if mentioned at all, is spoken of in a 
manner which leaves the reader to infer that the Scots had made 
mistakes in selecting their ancestors, and it was the duty of their 
descendants, so far as it lay in their power, to rectify the error. 

These old settlers possessed the energy, faith and cheerful nature 
that could make life endurable under the hardships and priva- 
tions of their situation on the frontier of civilized society. They had 
brought with them the manners, customs and habits of the Ireland of 
the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth century. I need not 
repeat examples of their quaint humor and queer stories, or of their 
use of the ardent spirits on public occasions, church-raising, train- 
ings, dancing parties, weddings and funerals. They believed in 
ghosts and witches and of course the devil; indeed, the devil was 

^They were from an ancient race of pure Cehic (Irish) origin, whose an- 
cestors had emigrated from Ireland to southern Scotland, and, in 1612— 20, re- 
turned to their ancestors' former home ; remaining in Ireland over a century 
before the emigration to America in 1718—36. In other words, from Ireland 
to Argyle (Scotland) these Irish went, to Ireland from Scotland they returned 
in the seventeenth century and to America their descendants came over a cen- 
tury later. Strange indeed it is that the history of the Irish origin of these 
so called Scots is suppressed by these modern "Scotch-Irish" writers. (See 
Vol. 2, pages 333 and 712, and Vol. 7, page 555, of Chambers Encyclopaedia.) 

These hardy and opinionated Celts, while in Scotland, left their indelible 
and unmistakable imprint on the language and character of the people, in the 
design of their humble dwellings and churches and more pretentious round 
towers. In reference to the Round Towers of Ireland, Hamilton wrote in 
1790: "There have been but two buildings of this species hitherto discovered 
out of Ireland ; they are both in Scotland, and the fashion of them has probably 
been borrowed from this country (Ireland), where they are still e.\tremely 
numerous. One of these usually called a Pictish tower, stands at Abernethy in 
Perthshire, and seems to be of very ancient date ; the other is at Brechin in 
Angusshire, probably much more modern than the former." Letters concern- 
ing the Northern Coast of the County Antrim, Ireland, by William Hamilton, 
Dublin, 1790, page 62. 



lO 

seen in person, if old Fiddler Baker told the truth, at the fork of the 
road, with horns and cloven foot, spitting fire.^ 

Under the conditions of this early time we need not wonder that 
when the admission of a new member to the church was in question 
and objection was raised that he made too free use of the bottle, 
"Well," said the grave elder, "if the Lord may have a church in 
Peterborough He must take such as there be." 

Nearly all of the schoolmasters of these early times were Irish- 
men from the central and southern counties of Ireland, but their 
history has been suppressed by modern writers, to the extent, indeed, 
in some instances, of omitting altogether the mention even of their 
Irish names. 

Rev. John H. Morison, a Unitarian minister, wrote in 1845 a 
history of Judge Jeremiah Smith, — before this system of suppress- 
ing and falsifying history had reached its present perfection — and 
in recording the facts of Smith's boyhood of about 1771, on page 14, 
stated "He began to study Latin, when about twelve years old, with 
Rudolphus Greene, an Irishman, employed by the town to keep 
school a quarter of the year in each of the four quarters of the town. 
While he was hearing a boy recite he usually held a stick in his hand, 
on which he cut a notch for every mistake, and, after the recitation 

' Rev. David Annan made a fiddle with his jackknife and would sit with his 
Bible open before him and his inspiring glass standing by, and play tunes 
while the children danced. His people were shocked, however, on one occasion 
when he told them in one of his sermons that "he had prayed over one bed of 
onions and fiddled over another to see which would fare the best." The result 
of the experiment was not reported. — Judge Nathaniel Holmes' Address of 
Oct. 24, 1889, page 23. 

Jonathan Smith, a lawyer in Clinton, Mass., in his recently published "Home 
of the Smith Family" on page 56, gives a description of a wake held in Peter- 
borough on the occasion of the death of Elizabeth Smith, April 18, 1769, as 
follows : "The near relatives and neighbors assembled in the evening to watch 
through the night with the body in the dimly lighted room. The exercises 
began with the reading of the Bible, followed by prayer ; then words of 
consolation and comfort were spoken to the mourners, and the virtue and 
character of the deceased were passed in review. Soon stories of ghosts, 
witches and demons were exchanged, tales of death warnings to the deceased 
and her friends. Later, stimulants were freely circulated, and before morning 
there was eating as well as drinking." Mr. Parker, in speaking of the cus- 
tom, says : "The affair often ended by shouts of laughter and revelry break- 
ing up the company." 



II 

was ended, another stick was employed to give a blow for every 
notch that had been cut." On page 16 it is recorded that "he was 
sent for a short time to New Boston, to be under the instruction of 
an Irishman, named Donovan." 

Some of the more recent histories, however, neglect to state that 
these men were Irish. For instance, in the biographical sketch of 
this same Judge Smith, the Peterborough History (1876), page 288, 
states : "At the age of twelve he began to study Latin at the public 
school, which was then kept in the old meeting house, by Master 
Rudolphus Greene. After this he studied for a short time with a 
Mr. Donovan at New Boston," quoted, with the word "Irishman" 
stricken out. 

It is strange what an aversion some of the recent town historians 
have had to telling the truth about these Irishmen, and with what 
studied efforts they have suppressed facts. 

The Antrim (N. H.) Town History — which, in its dealings with 
the early Irish settlers of that town, presents the work of an expert 
in this perversion — in recording, on page 215, the services of that 
old Irish schoolmaster, Tobias Butler, makes no mention whatever 
of his nationality. 

The seeker of exact truth and complete historical data will, how- 
ever, hardly consult histories written by narrow men, whose para- 
mount idea apparently was to twist the actual facts to conform to the 
way they would have Wished those facts to have been. 

The only explanation or excuse for this condition is, that town 
histories have to be written by persons familiar with the locality, 
hence the writer could be chosen only from a comparatively small 
number, and the selection, unfortunately, of men of contracted ideas 
sometimes becomes unavoidable; but these writings relative to these 
Irishmen and their achievements, will never be accepted by the 
future seeker of truth; it remains for the present generation, ad- 
vanced beyond the prejudices of the past, to write the true history 
of these Irish settlers. 



PD 18 f; 




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